The Game Trilogy (32 page)

‘This evening’s assignment is worth 25,000 points. If you succeed, you will have accumulated 33,200 in total, and because we have reached the end of this round, that means you will be our winner and that the Reward will therefore be yours.’

‘W-w-what!?’ HP spluttered, trying to absorb this new information.

‘Soo, if I do this, if I help you, you’ll let me back in? I mean … let me back into the Game?’ he said after a few seconds of bewildered thought.

‘HP, HP, HP,’ the Game Master chuckled, and for some reason the laughter made the hairs on the back of HP’s neck stand up.

‘What makes you think you ever left us?’

Everything was going smoothly, the convoy was still neatly grouped behind them. Almost perfect safety distance. Next
the Kymlinge junction, then past the Police Academy, Järva Krog, and they’d practically be in the city.

Ten minutes to go, max.

‘Look around you, my friend. Look at where you are! Right at the centre of events.

‘The setting for the culmination of the drama. And why? Well, because you have put yourself here. Entirely of your own accord! A quite exceptional achievement, as all of us who have been following your adventures agree. And obviously you must be rewarded accordingly!’

The voice was smooth as honey and HP couldn’t help lapping up its message.

‘The central role is yours, HP, you’ve gone
all the way
, as you would doubtless put it. This is
your
End Game,
your
richly deserved chance to write yourself into the history of the Game, not to mention humanity itself.’

The Game Master paused and HP tried in vain to digest what he had just been told and what it meant. But he just couldn’t manage it, this was total information overload!

‘Now listen carefully, HP, because this is your final assignment. This is what will turn you into a living legend,’ the Game Master went on. ‘For 25,000 points you must park the police van as close to the carriageway of the motorway as possible. You will open the back door and there you will find a cable which you will plug into this phone. When you have done that I suggest that you get yourself to safety. We will take care of the rest. Time is starting to run out, so it’s a matter of some urgency, but of course we will wait until you have got far enough away. Your safety is our first priority. Have you understood the assignment, HP?’

‘Y-yes,’ he muttered as his head started spinning at double and then triple speed.

This was totally absurd!

Fucking
Twilight Zone
on steroids!

But at the same time it was everything he had ever wanted – and more!

He was … speechless!

‘Good. I would like to conclude by pointing out that the choice is yours. Just like before, you yourself must decide if you want to carry out the assignment or not. The ball’s in your court, HP. Win, or fade away?

‘In other words, you have a very important decision to make, and I wish you the best of luck!’

The line abruptly went dead.

He stood where he was for a couple of seconds, then took a few stumbling steps towards the back doors of the police van. As soon as he saw the black duffle-bags he realized what the Game actually wanted him to do.

This was some mothafuckin’ freaky ass shit!

The flyover of the Kymlinge junction was approaching, and in the distance she could make out blue lights. It looked like there was a police vehicle at the bottom of the exit slip-road. A minibus to judge by the headlights. Suddenly, and for no good reason, she started to feel uneasy. There was something about that image that didn’t make sense, but it took her a few seconds before she worked out what it was.

He pulled down the zip of one of the bags and his suspicions were confirmed at once.
Dynamex
, it said in red lettering on the little packages. The bag was full to bursting, there must be at least fifty kilos in there in all.

He pulled the zip back up. Fifty kilos in each bag, a total of one hundred kilos, which would give … well,
what? One hell of a big bang, that much was obvious! So what were they trying to blow up?

When he saw the blue lights approaching he suddenly realized just how deep this rabbit-hole really was …

Déjà vu!

The tumble-dryer’s speed control had slipped into the red zone.

A police van facing towards them. Hardly the way she would have parked it for a standard roadblock. But it was considerably more troubling that there had been no other vans parked like that until now, right on the edge of the motorway. They were too far away for her to be able to see its number with her naked eye, but she remembered that they had binoculars in the glove compartment. It took a few seconds before she located the van and adjusted the focus.

There was a cable sticking out of one of the bags. A mini-USB, he just had to plug it in and drive the van a few metres closer to the carriageway, then run off into the woods. The Game Master would take care of the rest. One last call, ring-ring in the bag, then …

KA-BOOM!!

And after that?

‘To the victor, belongs the spoils’, according to lard-arse Bacala in
The Sopranos.
All his dreams would come true. He was going to be fucking well famous, at least if he could believe the Game Master.

The only question was: did he?

The blue lights were getting closer.

He didn’t have much time.

The decision was really very simple. He’d realized that a few days ago, but it hadn’t sunk in before now. That there
was only one alternative. The blue button or the red? Safe or all in? Win or fade away?

Ladies and gentlemen, the clock is ticking, please place your bets …

He pulled out his new Sony from his pocket, plugged in the cable and slammed the rear doors.

Then he raced round to the driver’s seat, put it in gear and slammed his foot down hard on the accelerator.

‘Stop!’ she yelled all of a sudden.

‘What?’ Wikström said, twisting his head to look questioningly at her.

‘Stop, for fuck’s sake, stop the car!’ she shouted, grabbing the radio mic.

The slip-road was getting closer and closer, and now you could read the number without binoculars, 1710, the van that was supposed to be in the workshop. The one Henke claimed had been stolen. Either way, the bastard thing wasn’t supposed to be here! Not now!

Absolutely not!

‘All cars stop!’ she shouted into the microphone, as Wikström slammed the brake-pedal down. As the seatbelt jerked and caught her, she watched as the police van began to move towards them.

‘Threat ahead, reverse and retreat!’ she commanded, and both Wikström and the drivers of the other vehicles all obeyed her immediately.

The convoy went into reverse, rolled some hundred metres and then, almost as if on command, the cars began to spin round all at once. They were going so fast that they never actually stopped before carrying on, now heading back the way they had come.

‘Alpha 102, take the lead,’ she concluded once the manoeuvre was complete and they were heading north again.

He spun the wheel, performing a screeching U-turn, then gunned back up the slip-road with the engine howling. A sharp right-hander with the flares playing around the wheels, then he was back on the Kymlinge link-road.

He could see the blue lights of the van flashing against the dark trees. A few seconds later they were joined by more.

Her hands were shaking, but she was having no problem controlling them. They had already gone past Sollentuna.

‘Control, we have a stolen police van, 1710, heading along the Kymlinge link-road towards Kista. Suggest you put our uniformed colleagues onto it, but tell them to keep a safe distance, over!’

The patrol car that had been guarding the roadblock was already tailing him, and soon there would be more.

But he didn’t give a flying fuck. Fifty-eight’s mobile was still ringing on the passenger seat, and the ghostly light from the screen was lighting up the whole cab. He took the turn-off into Kista on two wheels, steering furiously to avoid the grass mound at the centre of the roundabout, finally regaining control before putting his foot on the floor down the straight.

The mobile was still ringing.

Without taking his eyes off the road he reached for it.

The Game Master’s voice was cold.

‘You’re disappointing us, HP!’

‘You mean you’d rather have seen me blasted into crispy little atoms all over the E4?’ he snapped. ‘Then that’s your fucking problem! You said you’d wait until I was clear, you promised.
Did you really expect me to believe that crap!
Reality is a Game, someone once told me. A seamless fucking phone app where you only show me things you want me to see. Things that will get me to jump when you pull the strings. But now it’s my turn to show you something. Now it’s my turn to pull the strings. It’s time to take a bit of fucking reality to the Game, mofo! Tell the guard he’s got thirty seconds to get out!

‘Oh, and one more thing,’ he added in conclusion.

‘Yes …?’

‘Yippikayee, mothafuckers!!!’

He stuffed the phone in his pocket, spun the wheel and broke straight through the gate, then the grill blocking the entrance to the garage of Torshamnsgatan 142.

In the collision his forehead hit the windscreen.

The airbag exploded and threw him back in the seat, the van skidded violently and the back of it hit a concrete
pillar. HP was again almost thrown from his seat, saved this time by the protruding gear-stick.

The van lurched in the other direction, hitting another pillar before HP finally regained control of the wildly spinning steering wheel. He slammed on the brakes and the police van screeched to a stop two floors beneath the Game’s holy of holies.

HP staggered out, ran his hands over his body and discovered much to his relief that he didn’t have any bones sticking out, nor any gushing fountains of blood.

The cops seemed to have been smart enough to stay out on the road, because no-one had followed him down into the garage. He stared around wildly and discovered an emergency exit facing the patch of forest behind the building, and raced up the steps.

Once he was clear he pulled out fifty-eight’s mobile and tapped in a number. From ten metres in among the trees he pressed the dial button and in the back of the police van the Sony Ericsson suddenly came to life.

Ring-ring!

This one’s for you, Erman!
he just had time to think before the pressure-wave blew him off his feet and everything went black.

The package was waiting for her when she opened the door of the flat. A few envelopes and a leaflet from the local supermarket had landed on top of it, and it wasn’t before she gathered everything into a heap that she realized it was a bit thicker than normal.

A flat brown parcel, just the right size to fit through a letterbox. Considering its size, it was also pretty heavy.

She recognized the writing at once, but didn’t hurry to open it.

Four days had passed since that night on the E4.

Four tumultuous, completely crazy days!

She had escaped the media, thank goodness. The press office had handled all their questions and her name had been kept out of the story.

The media, with the evening tabloids in the lead, had gone completely bananas.

‘Terror Attack Foiled!’, ‘It Was Al-Qaeda!’
, and her own personal favourite:

‘Five Seconds from Disaster!’

Even though the factual information was fairly thin, to put it mildly, as usual all the newsrooms were competing
to show who knew most. But this time the experts were surprisingly unanimous.

Even the reporters who took turns conducting staged interviews with each other on television were sticking to the same basic synopsis.

The fact that an attack with potentially disastrous consequences had been thwarted at the last minute thanks to the alertness of the Personal Protection Unit didn’t appear to be under question from anyone – at least not yet, anyway. The current debate seemed to revolve around how the terrorists had managed to get hold of a police van without being caught, and then pack it with enough explosives to turn a two-storey brick building into ground zero. And, more obviously, whose fault it was.

Those in positions of responsibility were as usual blaming each other, the PR-consultants were working overtime, and in the meantime no-one was left any the wiser.

Why the terrorist had decided, once his mission had failed, to bury himself under an office building in Kista was unclear. The owners of the building had confirmed that the premises had been empty and that they hadn’t been aware of any threat, and that was pretty much where the discussion in the media ended.

Rebecca knew that the detectives from the Security Police hadn’t got much further. It would be another few days before the diggers had cleared enough of the rubble from the crater for an investigation of the crime-scene to get going seriously, but the forensics team didn’t sound particularly optimistic.

The same uncertainty applied, in spite of the media’s unshakable confidence, to the identity of the perpetrator. A vague description of a Swedish man in his thirties was all they had to go on, and there were very few other leads.

No-one had thought to doubt her own half-true story. That she had seen 1710 earlier that evening and for some reason had thought something wasn’t quite right. And that she had called to check with Mulle and had been reassured by his explanation about it being in for repairs, but then reacted when she saw the van on the slip-road and sounded the alarm.

It had meant a personal meeting with the National Chief of Police, Runeberg and the Secret Service’s European boss. Handshakes, praise and gratitude, all the things she usually had trouble accepting. But this time it had proved surprisingly easy to handle the praise.

At work she was now met with respectful glances from her colleagues, even Dejan. It was an unfamiliar experience, but actually very pleasant.

She had proved to the world that she had what it took – but, far more importantly, she had proved it to herself.

That realization was what made the praise and the medal considerably easier to swallow.

She hadn’t said anything to Micke, not yet, anyway. But he seemed to have noticed anyhow.

‘You seem different somehow,’ he had said when they met up in the days after the incident. ‘I don’t know what it is, but I like it,’ he had added, giving her hand an extra squeeze.

And for a little while everything had felt good, as if it was all going to be all right and that she actually deserved to be happy.

But then she started thinking about Henke and she knew that happy endings weren’t meant for people like her.

No sign of life from Henke.

Until now. The package.

Even so, she had never really doubted that he was okay.
People like Henke were always okay. Whoever had been driving that van, it wasn’t him, she was sure of that. Henke was a lot of things, but he was no terrorist.

The question now was whether or not she wanted to know what was in the parcel?

She let it sit there for a few minutes, then she couldn’t help taking a closer look. It was postmarked Frankfurt, and there was obviously no sender’s address. When she shook it she could hear a faint rattle.

She made a decision, took a deep breath, then tore the parcel open in a single movement, so hard that its contents spilled onto the kitchen floor with a metallic clatter.

For a few seconds she just stared down at the objects. Let her brain absorb what they were, and, more gradually, what they meant.

And once she had done that she fell to her knees, stretched out her hands and, with tears running down her cheeks, gathered them together and clutched them to her chest.

Six bolts.

Six rust-brown bolts that had once been attached to a balcony railing in a suburb south of Stockholm.

In spite of the years that had passed, you could still make out tool-marks on their heads. As if the person who had removed them hadn’t had quite the right tool, or had been forced to work at an uncomfortable angle.

It must have taken determination to get them out. A hell of a lot of determination, anger, maybe even burning hatred, before they came loose.

But for some reason she was still convinced that the power that had finally persuaded the concrete to let go was … love.

She sat on the black and white tiled floor for a long time, just crying.

Her tears were heart-wrenching, liberating and unhurried.

Then, quite suddenly, she stopped.

She got up slowly, opened the bin and carefully dropped the bolts in. Then she wiped her eyes, rinsed her face over the sink and went towards the bedroom. On the way she stopped in the hall, pulled the wire out of the answer machine and watched as the little red light slowly faded.

No more messages, she thought with a wry smile as she carried on into the bedroom.

In the middle of the desk lay a red pen and alongside it, right next to it so as to be close at hand, a block of white post-it notes with the police force logo on them.

The ink had gone through the paper and you could make out parts of the words that had been written on the sheets above.

Familiar handwriting, with round, almost childish lettering.

Deserve it
, she could just make out, and she took that as a sign.

She picked them up and opened the bedroom window, filled her lungs with air and then threw them as far away as she could.

The pen disappeared into the darkness at once, but the notes came apart from each other, splitting up and turning into little white sails against the night sky. They swirled round for a moment, almost as if they were saying goodbye, then blew off in the wind.

Free.

That was exactly how he felt.

Free.

Even though there were loads of people around him,
cars, exhaust fumes, and a cacophony of different sounds, he felt liberated. As if some unknown burden had been removed, lifted from his shoulders so he could suddenly stand up straight.

An absolutely incredible feeling!

He’d done it. He’d shown those bastards, once and for all.

Henrik HP Pettersson had saved them all. Not just Becca and all those cops or the American big cheese. Fuck, he’d basically managed to save the whole world and live to tell the tale.

Ditched the dark side, told the evil emperor to go fuck himself, and then blew the Death Star to pieces!

And even though his heroic efforts weren’t generally known and admired, it didn’t really matter at all. Comments and scores were completely unnecessary.

He
knew who he was, and that was more than enough!

The Game Master had actually been right about one thing. His life would always be split into two parts. Before and After the Game.

If you don’t change, then what’s the point of anything happening to you?

Shit, he couldn’t have said it better himself!

Even though he was battered and bruised, jetlagged, and his hearing still hadn’t come back properly after the explosion, the change was pretty remarkable.

He was actually a totally new person!

A genuine, real life, god damn superhero, and the feeling was beyond words. And, just like all the proper superheroes, he was planning to hold on tight to his secret identity from now on. Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, Clark Kent and Henrik HP Pettersson.

Not a bad posse!

Life was good.

Life was fucking bloody extraordinary!

He was planning to hang about here for another couple of days, basking in the afterglow, until he got his passport. Then a quick trip to Thailand in his new role as Nick Orton, Canadian backpacker. Lottery-winning Jesus would welcome him with open arms, they went way back. He could think about how to support himself later.

It still rankled that he hadn’t managed to get any money for himself like he’d hoped, but what the hell …

It would have been extra sweet not just to blow the Game to kingdom come, but to nick their money as well. He could have paid his sister back and given that poor cop who’d been half killed at Lindhagens a little something to ease the pain. But some things were just not meant to be …

He still had the laptop Manga had given him, but this was going to be its last mission. From now on he was going to be low-tech only. Keep his head below the radar and lie low for a few years. Then he’d see …

He turned off into a side-street and picked one of the ten or so different internet cafés along it at random. A few minutes later he was online.

A little farewell greeting and a couple of emails to the evening papers, then Henrik Pettersson would be a ghost-rider, a myth, a spook, a story told by other people.

And with that … pouff, he was gone!